By IANS,
Rampur (Uttar Pradesh) : Samajwadi Party leader Mohammed Azam Khan has once again criticised party general secretary Amar Singh and party MP Jayaprada and said he will not quit the organisation on his own despite being treated “like an insect”.
“If thrown out of the party, I will be free to decide my future course of action. However, I am not going to quit at my own,” said Khan, who is the party’s national general secretary and deputy leader of opposition in the Uttar Pradesh assembly.
“I am now being treated like an insect,” Khan said here late Tuesday indicating that his three-decade-old association with Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav could come to an end soon.
He recalled his early career when “followers of socialism under the leadership of Mulayam Singh Yadav” and said it was he and not Amar Singh who “chalked out the strategies after the downfall of the Janata government (in 1980)”.
The party’s new ties with Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) leader Kalyan Singh, who was the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh when the Babri Masjid was destroyed in 1992, has further upset Khan.
“Secular feelings of lakhs of Muslims, including myself, were hurt when the Babri mosque was demolished and it was I who had raised a campaign against the Congress government in centre and the Kalyan Singh government in the state. Now when the Samajwadi Party is planning friendly relations with the pivots of both, the Muslim community feels the old wounds again,” he said.
Khan has been opposing the candidature of film actress-turned-politician and sitting Rampur MP Jayaprada for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. “Myself and thousands of party workers had worked hard campaigning for her but she could not deliver in the constituency and my suggestions were ignored,” he said.